Stereoscopic Gesture-Based Game with A*Star

In 2009, W3-O Design Lab and Exploit Technologies, a division of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), collaborated on a revolutionary gesture-based game called “Shooting My Friend”.

http://www.youtube.com/v/LGTevZK3JRU

This highly-interactive game allows the player to play using just hand movements, without any handheld controller. The game’s launch was to showcase this new technology in Singapore, that was a precursor to the Microsoft Kinect.

The premise of the game was to “shoot” stones from a virtual slingshot at moving images of your friends. This simple yet addictive game debuted at a private event in December 2009 and garnered a good response from the crowd.

Although Exploit Technologies had the hardware for the game, it lacked a strong showcase or marketing efforts to make it work. Furthermore, their previous samples were cumbersome and didn’t push the 3-axis boundary. With the help from W3-O, the game went through several rounds of revisions before it was eventually unveiled in a scant 3.5 weeks. The new version also had to work with the Microsoft Natal, a proprietary stereoscopic camera with Infrared that captures the span and depth of the hand gestures and replicates it on the system like a computer mouse. The challenges were huge but the outcome made them all worth it.

We are indeed privileged to have worked with Exploit Technologies and we will continue to explore new options together.